Weigel

One Ticket to the John Edwards Movie

Mickey Kaus, one of the very few reporters who chased the (true) John Edwards rumors from the start, suggests that it would have made a better movie than the eventual Game Change Palin-ography.

I smell Hollywood Liberalism! It’s fun for leftish industry types to mock Sarah Palin. But the Edwards incident is deeply embarrassing–to much of the left, and the press–even though it’s a much more dramatic, complex tale. …

Also, there are better, less-famous anecdotes about Edwards. Much better anecdotes. The Politician, Andrew Young’s true-sounding* autobiography about his days as Edwards’s kept man, is stuffed with details about the odd personal obsessions of the family, the sacrifices John forced Andrew to make – I’m fond of the one in which Young moved out of his dream home in order to better fake the story that he was the father of Rielle Hunter’s baby. I’d much rather watch that than a re-enactment of Palin botching her interviews, which was re-enacted in real time in 2008 anyway.

Kaus was probably implying this, but the difference between The Edwards Story and Sarah’s Choice goes far beyond Edwards being “embarrassing” to the media. The Palin story is a paean to the media. In Recount, the entertaining 2008 HBO film about Florida in 2000, the media comes off as dopey and uninquisitive, easily manipulated by smart Republicans, occasionally manipulated by Democrats. In the Palin story, the press is overly hyena-ish, but it’s basically right that it needs to expose a fundamentally silly person before she can be vice president. The allies of the press: Wise Republicans who will one day tell their true stories on Morning Joe.

*I’m going to elide this one so long as there’s a trial on.